


come on back to the war before it hurts us

by forcynics



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, References to major death, References to rachel/tobias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:08:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forcynics/pseuds/forcynics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he sleeps he is chasing a girl with white-blonde hair flying behind her, glowing in sunlight like the hottest part of a fire, and he can never catch up to her but he always tries, and his throat burns up until he realizes he is trying to speak, of course he is trying to speak, choking on “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he tries to say her name but he always wakes up before he can get it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come on back to the war before it hurts us

_When they're only kids, Rachel wants nothing more than to be a gymnast._

_Her mother worries and says "I hope she doesn't fall," but Rachel doesn't worry. Rachel isn’t afraid of anything._

_She just grins, and she flips, and she finds her balance with amazing ease, and Jake thinks she would fly off that beam before she ever fell._

 

 

 

How do you make that kind of choice?

No one asks him and everyone wants to know. He would tell them, if only someone would ask him. There is no choice. There's no use pretending there is, fooling yourself into thinking it's a hypothetical situation imagined for a classroom discussion of morality, the "what if" that you always hope will never happen.

It's not that—it’s a million times worse and it’s easier. So when someone is finally brave enough to ask him, whether they’re an awed student or a reporter shoving a mic in his face – all the same, all just trying to strip away what little remains on his bones – he will tell them, because that is his secret and he will sell it to the world for free:

It isn’t a choice. You just do it.

When you’re the sixteen year-old commander of the entire Earth’s army and the alien inside your brother’s head is going to escape like he’s found a get-of-jail-free card, with a morphing cube and a group of his alien friends and a ship more powerful than anything you could ever dream of, unless you send your cousin to kill him, because she’s the only one—There is no choice. What kind of choice is that?

Some people might think that ‘easier’ means ‘easier to live with’. It doesn’t.

 

 

 

When he sleeps he is chasing a girl with white-blonde hair flying behind her, glowing in sunlight like the hottest part of a fire, and he can never catch up to her but he always tries, and his throat burns up until he realizes he is trying to speak, of course he is trying to speak, choking on “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he tries to say her name but he always wakes up before he can get it out.

 

 

 

“Okay,” she says, and there’s a moment where he thinks that might be it, they’ll just stand a foot apart and they’ll understand and that will be enough. He will send her off and she will die. But he takes her in his arms one last time, of course he does, and he clenches his fist in the back of her t-shirt when she knots her arms around his neck, and he cannot breathe.

“Go do it, Jakey,” she says, and she hasn’t called him that since they were kids and she was proving she would never fall off the balance beam, proving that she was invincible and don’t he ever think anything else.

“Save the world.” It’s all on him, but she doesn’t put it there maliciously; it’s not a command as much as an acknowledgment of the weight that has been hanging by a tight noose around his neck since they were thirteen years old and stumbled into a construction site.

 

 

 

It was always going to be one of them. Maybe that’s hindsight talking, but he thinks it’s the truth, as much as he can vow anything.

Of everyone, they understood. They may have fought, they may have all bickered between them, alliances shifting from day to day and fight to fight, but at the end of all the days and all the fights, Rachel and Jake were made of the same—it’s the same blood that shapes them both, and it could have gone the other way, he thinks. If Rachel had been their leader, and if she’d sent him to die, he would have gone.

But maybe that’s hindsight talking too. He was never as brave as Rachel, never that same kind of recklessly brave at least, but if anyone could come close—well. They were made of the same, and they were hardened.

What kind of leader would Rachel have been, he wonders when it’s too late to matter. What would Rachel have ordered in his place, what would she have made them do. She loved the fight more than he ever could, but he made decisions crueler than she ever did. If there was darkness in Rachel there was a different darkness in him, but it was there all the same—is there still. He doesn’t know if something like that can ever leave you.

 

 

 

The world will never know this Rachel:

She laughs after battle. She grins and unnerves, because she loves the fight more than any of them, and Jake never knows if it scares him or if he wishes he was the same. Her grin is his grin and her laugh is his laugh—their faces are cut from the same, move in the same way, and he could be just like her, laughing and grinning and delighting in the fight, but he cannot move his same mouth into that same grin. And he just watches.

They lived in sequences of horror, and Jake can never decide if it changed them or only brought out parts of them that were always there but never would have been known in a happier world.

But Rachel is excited in violence, and there is something glorious in the way she kills. She loves it, dangerously, but that will never be written in the history books. They will be heroes, both of them, and no one will write of how war hardened them into people afraid of themselves, afraid of what they were capable of, the calls they could make and the lines they could cross.

The world will never know either of them like this. But it’s better that way, and Jake will take Rachel’s grins to his grave.

 

 

 

“Please, Jake,” Tobias begged. There was no point in Tobias begging, there was no point in anything once Rachel was on that ship, but Tobias begged anyway, and Jake will never forget the sound of it, and he will always be silent.

 _I am breaking my own heart too_ , he could have said. _If that helps. I have sent the girl we love to die and you can’t possibly make me hurt more than I already do._

He said nothing. He will always remember how Tobias begged and he said nothing.

_Ruthless, arrogant. Son of a bitch._

Would Cassie have said the same to Rachel, if everything was reversed? He would have gone (he likes to think), but that’s not how it happened. And despite whatever Marco may think, Jake doesn’t spend his time agonizing over what he could have done differently. He just remembers, and he lets it pull heavier and heavier around his neck, tighter and tighter until he cannot breathe.

 

 

 

He sits at her memorial and he thinks _Okay, Rachel. We did it. We saved the world._

The memorial is ugly. (It’s not. It’s beautiful. The finest architects the planet had to offer poured their souls into Rachel’s memorial. She would have hated it. She would have laughed. She would have loved it. How is he supposed to know if he can’t ask her?)

He kicks the ground, just to mar the perfect green, picturing Rachel after battle with her hair out of place. They should have built her memorial on top of Mount Everest, made everyone risk their fucking lives climbing to the top of the world just for the chance to pay worship to her, since that’s all anyone else wants to do. Once, they had called her _goddess of war_ as a joke, and now in death the whole world really has elevated her to an almost deity-like status.

There are words on her memorial that tell a story of sacrifice, a girl dead too young and they call her a saviour. At this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if there are efforts being made to canonize her. _Saint Rachel_. Go ahead, he thinks. He wouldn’t be surprised, he would just laugh—laugh and laugh and laugh until he can’t stop, until the sound breaks him clean in half like he’s been waiting for.

(She wanted to be a gymnast, a warrior, never a martyr.)

 _Here lies Rachel_ , he re-writes, for himself only. _She was strong and beautiful and terrifying and we loved her, and now she is dead._ At least she’s not stuck buried underground. Tobias hates him and may always hate him, but Jake will always be grateful for the red-tailed hawk scattering Rachel’s ashes across the skies.

She is always flying now. She will never fall.

 

 


End file.
